Salvete homines! It has been raised before that we need a Latin thread so here it is. Very few if any speak Latin but enough of us have studied it to get into fights over etymologies and grammar. I know I certainly need to brush up on my Latin. So, I've given 4.5yrs to Latin (best subject ever) and it has opened up the world of languages to me. Come share your experiences and educte the masses. Have fun.

P.S. I don't care who taught you what, I don't want to hear arguments over the pnounciations of 'V' and 'C' and 'Æ' and the like. No-one can prove it, just pronounce it however you want and leave it at that.

Huge fan of Latin. I'm a member of the Junior Classical League, and I'll probably be teaching a Latin I class as a senior in high school with a friend after I've completed a bit more of my education in it.

Oh, wow. I loved Latin -- took 4 years of it in high school. It's been a year since, and I've forgotten most of it. Then again, since it was all translations, and we focused on grammar much more than vocabulary, I suppose it's natural for things not to be ingrained in my head.

Learning about Roman culture was awesome, but I think the reason why I loved the class so much was because of all the other students. I don't know if it was this way for anyone else, but I found that the most interesting, the smartest, the oddest, and the nerdiest students were in the Latin class.

It was often hard being the ones learning a "dead language" -- and I don't just mean the plebs who would ask us to "say something in Latin." The other foreign languages looked down on us. :/ For example, every year we would have a get-together of all the foreign language classes, and we'd each bring foods from our language's culture (which usually meant that the Spanish students just brought bags of chips ). Apparently they didn't think that Latin had food to go with it (not even Italian food!), so they would just assign us to bring the soda pop, the bastards. Thankfully, we'd go above and beyond, bringing things like focaccia to beat down those Spaniards.

Sorry, I got into my linguistic-pride mode of thinking. O_o

In our first year, we all made togas or stolas, and we would always have fun with the homecoming parade. One time we had two guys on the back of a flatbed trailer, in freakishly short shorts, fighting as gladiators, while the rest of us walked in our togas, screaming out Latin chants in our best scary/cultist/Satanic voices:Mica, mica, parva stellaMiror quaenam sis tam bellaSplendens enimus in illoAlba velut, gemma caelo!Very fun to see the elementary school teachers pull back slightly in nervousness.

Such a tight-knit group we were (and we had to be, since we weren't like the other languages... where EVERYONE in the school was taking Spanish or French). We'd watch Spartacus and I, Claudius and Clash of the Titans. Our natural geekishness led us to all bake pies and bring them to school on March 14.

OK, nostalgia time over.

Say, what textbooks did you use to learn Latin? In the first couple years, we used the Cambridge course, and while they didn't really give the proper grammar background that other books eventually gave us, they sure were fun -- especially the early stories about how "ancilla [everyone] delectat."

Gadren wrote:Learning about Roman culture was awesome, but I think the reason why I loved the class so much was because of all the other students. I don't know if it was this way for anyone else, but I found that the most interesting, the smartest, the oddest, and the nerdiest students were in the Latin class.

Agreed, It's always fun, the further you go the smaller and closer the group becomes, 'tis awesome. We used Cambridge for the first 3 years, then some Oxford texts.Why pies on March 14? The Ides were the 15th.

Beware the ideas of march, he has an overactive assassination. (c) -me [jk]

habui speram altam ut loquemur fortasse in latina, tamen video illud evellere non posse est. Ingemo huic.I had high hopes that we might speak in latin, I see, however, that's out of the question; It makes me sigh.

[I'm Level III, going into IV/V AP next year. Placed #1 in Michigan with a 39/40. It depresses me that no one in Mi from lvl 3 aced this year's test. Woulda' been so cool to have been the only one... *SOB*]

Fact of the day: Public keyboards boast three times the e. coli of the average toilet seat. Happy blogging!

I have fond memories of school latin courses. In years 5 & 6 of primary school, Latin was on the curriculum, what with it being an independent boys' school and all, with several lessons a week with a grumpy woman (to those who never did the homework), affectionately known as Bazza. I think this was one of the fields where I got exam marks worthy of being 'top in the set', with said set being those who have mostly gone on for challenging spots at Oxbridge.So Latin at primary school is a fairly vivid memory of mine. I think the texts we used back then was Ecce Romani, or 'Look at the Romans'. I think my initial translation was "Look (v.) Roman (adj.)!" Those books started off with some family in the country, going along the Via Appia to Rome, with the father taking up a job in the Senate I believe. I seem to remember a certain Sextus "descendit in piscinam", or falling into a fishpond, NOT a swimming pool as we had drilled into us (we did French at the same level at that school, so la piscine was also in our vocabulary).Lessons were filled with: "Pugnare!" exclamations and this regular opener:"Salvete pueri""Salve magister""Sedete"

When I moved to secondary school, Latin was offered in year 9, to go instead of Music and Design-Technology in the timetable. I eagerly signed up for it, and made good friends with Caecilius, Metella and Quintus. Yes, I too did the Cambridge Latin Course. Not only did I do it, but I kicked arse on it, coming top in the set of about 15 at the end of year, netting myself a nice little prize at the school awards ceremony.Caecilius est in horto. Senex est perterritus.[I should remember more terminology and grammar, but not much springs to mind in terms of complete phrases currently.]

I did consider continuing Latin at GCSE-level, and I'd gone down to Latin/German as the conundrum for a final course. After recommendation from all 3 languages teachers (Fr, De and La) I had at the time, I went on to do German, and carried on all the way to A2 level.

Regardless, I still signed up for a local intermediate-level (~13-15 years) Latin reading competition a year later, and came a respectable third, beating even those at my school in the year above and doing GCSE Latin, and getting trounced by those at the more elite boys' secondary school in the area, who probably did Drama alongside it, and actually could translate the passage word-for-word.IIRC, the passage I was doing was from either the Aeneid or the Illiad, where it shows the burning of Troy as one man, possibly Pelias, stands atop his palace and gazes down at the blazing citadel.I don't think I ever used the book token reward from it though, but I got my photo in a school newsletter wearing a toga.

I can't believe I've never asked, but can you not say, "pueri" to mean boys and girls just as other languages? For instance, in Spanish you say "hijos" to mean sons and daughters though it is the masculine form so it also can just mean sons. If you only have daughters you say "hijas".

"Puer" specifically means boy, I think, while "hij(o/a)" means "child", with the gender being changeable by the ending. Not sure though.

I've also got to join the Cambridge Latin Course fanpeoples. Show him your giant crane!

"It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people"

Perhaps if you learnt to use the letter 'u' you might find words easier, not to mention that most Latin teachers now prefer to make everyone spell 'v' as 'u' (uinum, uia, uir). It drives me insane. This serves no purpose other than to make everythign more complicated.

Asleep or Wrong wrote:yeah, the history of latin orthography is ridiculous. I've no idea why the u for both vowel and consonant lowercase v convention stuck.

Well,one cause could have been the fact the Etruscan alphabet was weird but I don't know as wikipedia can't show mer the dam glyphs!

Also, have you ever tries carving a 'U'? It's waaaaaay easier to do a 'V'. That being said, I'd say this whole u/v mix up (if it ever existed) was cleared up in the first few hundred years surely. At least by the time of Virgil.

Lingua latina pulcherrima est, sed mihi eam multum studendum est.(Apologies for bad grammar.)That being said, I really forgot a lot of my Latin but I enjoyed it in high school so much that I actually met up with a language student from uni to speak latin once a week. We would sit in a cafe, have some tea and talk in latin for hours.

Sadly, I couldn't study Latin at school after 11th grade because I was literally the only one in the school who wanted to continue the course, but I went on reading Ovid on my own (and tried my hands on love poetry in hexameters. To be short, I failed, it was correct but, let's just say, the Vogons are only the third-worst poets in the universe). And when we read Pico della Mirandola in philosophy later, the original text was included in the copy so i would usually read the original rather than the translation. It was cool, really, I've got to re-learn my Latin.

OliverTheMerc wrote: oh man I need to learn how to say "Why are we still talking about this?" in Latin, and to abbreviate it to use instead of QED at the end of very long proofs maybe just proofs where I show something is the Catalan numbers

Any help?

GENERATION 1-i: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum. Square it, and then add i to the generation.